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May 13, 2017

Miserable failure of quantitative science to understand anything

Dear Jack

You say

"How the mental wave function moves matter beyond classical forces is completely trivial - it is in the Hamilton-Jacobi equation with the new quantum potential that depends on h"

Perhaps you can explain what really happens in your view when a single photon passes through the double slit apparatus and then strikes a single randomly chosen point on the detector screen. If its wave function containing all the other potential interactions with the screen does not in some sense collapse then what happens to all those other possibilities? If it is just because the conscious observer splits into many copies each observing a different outcome in a separate universe I do not find that plausible. If I understand you correctly, you are proposing that the photon itself is a consciousness, which is a view I totally agree with. I am just unsure of what you are saying about the way a consciousness acts. I believe its action is very simple. It's experience is all the possible positions of the photon (suitably weighted by appropriate qualia) and its action is to freely choose the one where the photon will be found to be when a measurement takes place. For me the reality described by the wave function is the effects of other consciousnesses. When a measurement takes place that reality does not vanish. It just ceases to be experienced by the consciousness whose action is being measured.

Trying to understand consciousness using quantum mechanics is like trying to understand gravity using special relativity.

“Little could Herbert, Sarfatti, and the others know that their dogged pursuit of faster-than-light communication—and the subtle reasons for its failure—would help launch a billion-dollar industry. … Their efforts instigated major work on Bell’s theorem and the foundations of quantum theory. Most important became known as the “no-cloning theorem,” at the heart of today’s quantum encryption technology”

MIT Physics Professor David Kaiser in the book “How the Hippies Saved Physics”

...

Everything you think you know about the meaning of quantum mechanics is not even wrong if you subscribe to the "collapse" interpretation on Bohr, Von-Neumann, Wigner, Wheeler, Stapp, Penrose et-al.

"Collapse" is like Ptolemy's "epicycles" it works well enough for strong measurements on simple configurations of dead matter.

It fails completely for living matter where we need the new PQM beyond the proper domain of validity of QM "collapse" - same for "many worlds" also no good...

Conscious qualia are analogous to gravity. You cannot explain gravity using Einstein's special relativity. You need Einstein's general relativity. In the same way, you cannot explain our conscious qualia using any interpretation of QM not even Bohm's 1952 version for that we need PQM in the Sutherland mathematical language with my physical interpretation appended to it. This will lead to new technology of conscious nano-electronic machines.

Indeed, we are such machines (Hameroff's MTs)

Jack Sarfatti

May 11, 2017

...

Priyedarshi,

"And 'true' and 'false' in any formal system are under an interpretation. Is the notion of truth in theology the same as that in formal systems? It could be of course."

True and false depend on the interpretation, but, at least in the so called first order logics, valid and invalid is not dependent of the interpretation. There is a fundamental theorem, also due to Gödel, of "completeness" to that effect: a theorem in a theory will be true in all interpretations of the theory.

Now, the notion of truth in theology will of course depend on which theology or theologies we are willing to consider, or assume, if only for the sake of the discussion.

What is nice in the theologies of the self-referentially correct machines is that we can apply the tools of mathematical logic to put light on the questions.

The problem, which is also the solution, is that for any formal system or machine, once the notion of truth encompasses the entire language of the formal system/machine, the formal system/machine will no more be able to define that notion of truth, although the machine will be able to define locally usable approximations. So, that all encompassing truth do play some role of God. It is the root of the existence of the machine, and its relation with possible other universal number/machines, and it is literally unnameable by the machine (or "in" the formal theory corresponding to the theorem, or beliefs, of that machine).

In theology, I think that Truth is all encompassing, and like many theologians in the West and in the East, I believe that God and Truth are, for all purpose, equivalent: God to make sense has to obey Truth, and by its maximal possible potency, Truth has to obey God. This does not preclude the discovery of more interesting notions of God, and indeed, that happens already, as mechanism implies a sort of Noùs, which overwhelms that notion of truth. A bit like in Plotinus, God has lost control on the "inferior" hypostases, and basically, matter arise where God loses control. The roots of matter is the indetermination due to the finite aperture through which "God look at itself" in the effective, mechanical, "terrestrial" plane.

I don't know if the theology of machines are true, or apply to us. If true, it has a sort of unbelievable, that is unprovable by the machine own means, set of truth, and mechanism, if true, belongs itself in that set. That "theology" enforced the digital doctor to avoid saying things like "science has proven that you can survive with this digital brain transplant". It logically requires already an act of faith. Nobody can justify a theology, in any public way, but we might "know" that mechanism is false, because it put some strong constraints on the physical appearances. It determines it, except for the historico-geographical indexicals.

It favorizes and extends Everett multiplication of bodies and souls, the "relative states" in Arithmetic. Mechanism generalizes the "embedding of the physicists in the physical reality", into an embedding of a dreaming mathematicians in the arithmetical reality. Everett explains the collapse phenomenologically, mechanism should explain the wave in a generalization of that phenomenology. The math seems to confirm formally that the machine appearance of matter obeys some quantum logic.

There is so much to read as philosophy is really broad... My areas right now are history of logic and Plato and some philosophy of science, none of them really take me towards Hegel or Aurobindo. If I had time I would rather devote it first to medieval debates in Indian philosophy among the nyayikas, Buddhists and Jains. These are intricate, full of arguments and debates. Philosophy to me is about debates and not dogma. This is what was so clear about Heraclitus's methodology. Russell was a student of Bradley who was a big fan of Hegel and an idealist. Then Russell read Leibniz and became a lifelong critique of Hegel but he really did not read Hegel much as his attention was on other issues like philosopohical logic, philosophy of mathematics and epistemology. So you see philosophy is very broad. It would take many life times to go through the works of Leibniz, who, to me, at least in the west, is the greatest mind ever. Right now I am working on some books with a lawyer and I have been looking at some of Leibniz's works on jurisprudence. Leibniz also more or less set the framework for the computational theory of mind. Perhaps some day I will read Aurobindo. As for Hegel, I am not so sure if I will have the time. His methodology is complex but I have an aversion to his holism and idealism. I see philosophy like Lakatos saw science, as a series of research projects or research programmes which are given an umbrella cover word like 'philosophy'. I have aversion to any systems or philosophers that claim to have answers to everything under the sun or a system that explains everything. And that is what is underlying in the way I have been responding on Sadhu Sanga. Everything should be open to critical scrutiny and debate otherwise it is not philosophy.

Priyedarshi

May 12, 2017

...

In our philosophy courses we train students to become journalists of philosophy rather than specialists in some topic of philosophy. There is no reason whatsoever why every philosophy student or teacher should be familiar with Hegel or even Kant or Plato (these two being much more fundamental in history of philosophy than Hegel). In the US after 4 years of BA you are required to do two and a half years of course work. There are no compulsory courses, neither in BA nor in graduate school. So a student could go through a PhD program without ever having read Hegel.. For example, I had never read Spinoza in any of my courses. In India we don't allow that. Rather everyone must have some familiarity with Spinoza. So, we emphasize secondary sources rather than primary sources, thereby creating journalists rather than specialized philosophers.

Like I have said before, philosophy is so vast. What is important is to guide those interested in philosophy through to whatever area they are interested in rather than guiding them towards the areas we are interested in as teachers. This is simply not being done in India I am afraid. Once a student is in an environment where there are 15 or 16 professors who are rigorously working on diverse areas, each specializing different, then the student gets inspired and picks up a unique area of her own.

By the way, Jerry Coyne, one of the great high priests of fundamaterialism, once admitted, though with great reluctance, that epigenetic changes - even those caused by psychological phenomena - do in fact last for at least 4 generations - and hinted that it might actually be possible that they could lead to longer lasting or even permanent genetic changes.

It doesn’t take much to see that that could lead to a radical overview of what evolution really is. Add to that the irrefutable replicated psi studies, and recognizing that psi effects could be part of these epigenetic changes, particularly because of the lack of defined individuality in most animals leading to field-psi effects, and you at least begin to see the meaningfulness of evolution.

Add to that a revolution in the understanding of how so called “laws of nature” came about and how they could possibly persist (see Raymond Tallis and Steve Talbot on this; Talbot possibly being the best writer available on the net on the miserable failure of quantitative science to understand anything about anything), combine with a revolutionary understanding of psi (see James Carpenter’s “First Sight” theory, mix with Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology) and place it all on a foundation of Ed Kelly’s panentheism (see Michael Murphy’s free article on the net) and Sri Aurobindo’s purna advaita (integral non dualism) and you have the first inklings of what science will be like in the 22nd century.

Patrik, Jerry Coyne is one of the biggest materialist fanatics on the net. He is absolutely impervious to reason when any of his physicalist fantasies are challenged.

There is not a single empirical finding that requires us to believe in the truly psychotic and ultimately incoherent faith of physicalism. Thus, when someone is an adherent of that faith, they have to not only believe crazy things, but attack all the sensible things that challenge their faith.